South Sudan Independence? Really?

Republic of South Sudan President Salva KiirKPFA Weekend News Anchor Cameron Jones: South Sudan celebrated its independence from the Northern government of Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir today. Wearing his trademark cowboy hat, the new South Sudanese President Salva Kiir was sworn in today, for a four year term.

Salva Kiir, President of the Republic of South Sudan: As the President of the Republic of South Sudan, I shall be faithful and bear true allegiance to the Republic of South Sudan.

KPFA Weekend News Anchor Cameron Jones: The New York Times congratulated movie actor George Clooney, an ardent campaigner for Southern Sudanese independence, earlier this week, though many African people thought that the Sudanese people might have more rightly been at the center of the South’s Independence Day story. Others emphasized the U.S. and allies’ interest in managing Sudan’s vast oil reserves. KPFA's Ann Garrison has more.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: The new African state of South Sudan is widely understood to be a U.S. protectorate. Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar and professor at Uganda’s Makerera University wrote that independence had never been a goal of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army led by martyred leader John Garang, and, that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir agreed to Southern Sudan’s January independence referendum only because, post 9/11, he feared becoming the next target of US aggression, after Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a consequence, Al-Bashir’s northern, Khartoum government now faces Southern control of 75% of Sudan’s oil, and, many NGO lobbies and editorial writers have made it clear that they won't be satisfied until President Al-Bashir is tried at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where he is the first sitting head of state to be indicted.

Veteran Africa investigator Keith Harmon Snow, who has written extensively about Sudan says that the people who should be tried at the Hague are the western war criminals who have backed 20 years of covert guerrilla warfare, war crimes and genocide.

Keith Harmon Snow: The U.S., Britain and Israel prosecuted this covert war through their key military proxies, the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army, which had nothing to do with "liberation," and the Uganda People's Defense Forces, which had nothing to do with the people. As in Rwanda, English-language propaganda about South Sudan centered on false accusations of genocide, and on the massive disinformation campaign about "slavery," which was peddled by the Judeo-Christian organizations that were shipping weapons and Bibles into Sudan under the so-called humanitarian enterprise OPERATION LIFELINE SUDAN. US State Department disinformation falsely accused Bashir with atrocities actually committed by the US-Israeli guerrilla proxies like the Justice and Equality Movement, the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army and its Darfur wing, the Sudan Liberation Army, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's Ugandan People's Defense Forces. The covert US wars in Rwanda, Congo, South Sudan and Darfur -- and the propaganda fronts that covered them up -- have been coordinated by the same people under every US president since Ronald Reagan: national security agents like Roger Winter, Susan Rice, Prudence Bushnell, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and John Prendergast.

The new South Sudan, in bright red.

KPFA: Snow says that the corporate executives now laying claim to South Sudan's resources include former Pentagon and State Department officials:

Keith Harmon Snow: Now this is where it gets really interesting. Philippe Heilberg's JARCH Capital, an investment firm, acquired 400,000 hectares in South Sudan in the last few years. These are landholdings the size of Vermont and these were acquired from the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army warlord Gabriel Matip. Other JARCH Capital executives include a former Clinton era Pentagon agent named Gwenyth Todd, and Joseph Wilson. In 1997, just before Clinton bombed the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, Joseph Wilson ran the National Security Council's East Africa Desk. Of course, working under him at the time, was none other than National Security Council agent John Prendergast, America's humanitarian poster boy for Sudan and George Clooney's sidekick.

KPFA: Keith Harmon Snow's 2009 investigative report "AFRICOM's Covert War in Sudan" was one of Project Censored's top 25 Censored Stories that year. It can be read on the website of the San Francisco Bay View, Dissident Voice, or the Black Star News.